The Gnosticism of Giorgio Morandi

“For students of painting (Morandi) continues to question, allowing us through painted palimpsests to see him in the act of deciding. In spite of a natural reclusive inclination, he showed us what it is to believe in painting as a way of life, to love its tattletale evidence of our humanness….In one completed painting exists a layering of faltering probes: passage over passage of stutterings, mutings, bumblings, corrections, slaps and sludges which finally slouch towards a homemade hand-hewn idealization. This is a stirring and captivating demonstration of how to labor a painting through to a life of its own. It is as if the actual birth process of a painting has been anthologized.”      –Wayne Thiebaud, on Morandi

Read Wayne Thiebaud’s entire article on Giorgio Morandi, published in the New York Times, November 15, 1981, on occasion of the retrospective of Morandi’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Wayne Thiebaud’s Painted World

I was privileged as a young student to participate in a workshop at Mountain Lake in Virginia in the early 1980s, organized by my teacher, Ray Kass, from Virginia Tech. I imagined that Thiebaud would be a kind of Oscar Wilde-like character, as colorful and flamboyant as his delicious paintings of pies and cakes that were very much defining the contemporary art world at that time, the world that I, as a young painter, was preparing to enter. What I found instead was a deeply humble man who wasn’t much interested in talking about himself, his work, or his reputation. We spent an evening looking at old, brown masters of the past – Chardin, Rembrandt, Tintoretto and others – while Thiebaud held forth on his deeply held belief in the need for painters to work at acquiring the disciplines of looking and seeing the world around them. Here’s an instructive excerpt of a talk by Wayne Thiebaud given at the New York Studio School in 1999. In it he articulates in his wonderfully clear, no-nonsense way, some of the same values that he shared with us those many years ago.

Wayne Thiebaud and Morandi

The Morandi Museum in Bologna will be showing still-life paintings by Wayne Thiebaud with those of Giorgio Morandi through October 2. In this video, Wayne Thiebaud discusses the influence of Morandi on his own work, and also speaks beautifully to many of the issues in painting that we have dealt with in class.

THIEBAUD VIA MORANDI from Victor Loh on Vimeo.